June 8, Pentecost C John 14:8-17, (25-27)

As a cradle christian in this majority-Christian society, I’ve never had cause to relate to the Johannine community as I imagine it. While I know there is debate over what exactly the Johannine community was, I imagine it may have been composed of people once embedded in their villages and households, their synagogues and practices. But as each came to believe in Jesus—one here, a couple there—they were more and more disruptive of the settled way of things and thus less easily accepted. So they found one another, forming intimate relationships within what we today might call “found families.”

And what intimacy it was, beginning with their experience of Jesus as read back into the experience of the first disciples and written into their gospel narrative. Karoline Lewis, in her commentary on the Fourth Gospel, points out how Jesus encourages an intimacy with God akin to a child nursing at the breast of its mother. Indeed, she claims the earthly analogue that should give image to our relationship with God our Father is one of a nursing child—because this level of intimacy isn’t reserved exclusively for Jesus. This is for all who’d become children of God, all who’d come to see and to believe and who now only barely have a home in this unbelieving world.

This permeates the whole of John: an encouragement, indeed an insistence, on intimacy. In John’s telling, even the way the Holy Spirit comes into the world presses upon us an almost unbearable closeness—at least according to this New Englander, for whom personal space involves a three-foot radius. The resurrected Jesus breathes on the disciples, as God did in the beginning, breathing the breath of life into all creatures.